Impressed by Powerpoint? Not really.

Program compatability – you gotta love it. For years I’ve made my presentations in OpenOffice Impress, because it does everything I’d be doing in Powerpoint and…well, it’s free! You can’t beat that. In the end I’d convert my presentation to the Powerpoint format for downloads, so that everybody could open it. I never had problems with that workflow, and it still worked a few days ago. But all of the sudden, as of yesterday, Powerpoint refuses to open any .ppt file that I save out from Impress. Any, even the simplest onesheet. “Powerpoint can’t open the type of file represented by !GDC2007.ppt.” What the hell? You didn’t complain three days ago? And I haven’t upgraded Impress or Powerpoint, how could this be broken all of the sudden?

The solution is so simple yet annoying that it took me two days to figure it out. Oh, Powerpoint can open the file type represented by !GDC2007.ppt – but only when that file isn’t already opened in Impress. Because then, some super special “You can’t have it! I’m using it! Neener neener neener!” stuff must be going on behind the scenes, unheard by my weak human ears. That’s some weak sauce – and I don’t even know which application to blame for it…